Chapter Description

Wise-cracking authors Olav Martin Kvern and David Blatner take you through all of InDesign's typesetting tools, sharing real world techniques for getting your work done faster and more efficiently along the way.

From the Book

Find Font

You may not know that InDesign includes a list of all the fonts used in a document in the file's metadata. It's easy to see this list in the Metadata panel inside Bridge, but simply knowing what fonts are called for doesn't usually help you much. No, you need a tool to manage those fonts—including finding where they're used on your pages and perhaps even replacing them with other fonts. That tool is Find Font, under the Type menu.

The Find Font dialog box displays a list of every font that appears somewhere on a document page—including on master pages and in linked PDF or EPS graphics (see Figure 4-29). It does not list fonts that are defined in paragraph or character styles that aren't actually applied to text anywhere. If you click the More Info button, the dialog box displays more information about each font you click on, including on which pages you'll find the font, which styles include this font in their definition, how many text characters appear in this font, and what the fonts version number is. (Yes, there is often more than one version of the same font, each with its own number, just like other software.) Note that showing More Info can slow down the Find Font dialog box significantly, so we often leave this closed.

If you're not sure where a font is living on your hard drive, the Find Font dialog comes to the rescue: Not only is the path to the font listed in More Info, but you can click Reveal in Finder (or Reveal in Explorer in Windows) to open the folder that contains the font.

Replacing Fonts. It's a good idea to visit Find Font every now and again, and especially before finishing your job. We often find rogue fonts sneaking in to documents when we import or copy and paste text from Word or some other document. For example, as we type this, we checked and found that Times New Roman is in this document for some reason. More Info tells us that it's applied to 36 characters on two different pages. Fortunately, the rest of the Find Font dialog box acts like the Find/Change dialog box, so we can quickly rid ourselves of this aberration.

The fastest way to find that incorrectly-styled text is to select the font in the list at the top of the dialog box and click the Find Next button. To change this to a more appropriate font, choose the font and style in the Replace With section and click Change, Change All, or Change/Find.

If you believe the errant font is actually inside a character or paragraph style definition, then turn on the Redefine Style When Changing All checkbox before you click Change All. Otherwise, you'll change the font on your document pages, but the font will still be lurking inside the style, just waiting to surprise you again when you least expect it.

By the way, sometimes you'll find that Find Font lists a font as being used in your document but Find Next won't find it, and More Info tells you that there are zero characters that have this font applied to it. This happens when the font is applied only to automatic bullets or numbering (see "Bullets and Numbering," later in this chapter). Find Font will also tell you a font exists when it really doesn't if you have an empty frame that used to contain text in that font—just another good reason not to leave empty frames lying around.